


head is a hospital (someone please tend to it)

by ryyves



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Alternate Universe - Benzaiten Steel Lives, Brain Injury, Canon Divergent, Canon-Typical Attempted Murder, Canon-Typical Violence, Domestic, Gen, Head trauma, Healing, gentle Sarah lives au, mostly because I forget how she died and at this point I'm too afraid to ask
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-28
Updated: 2020-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:54:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27761089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryyves/pseuds/ryyves
Summary: The laser misses, mostly, which means that Benzaiten Steel is lucky.
Relationships: Benzaiten Steel & Juno Steel
Comments: 15
Kudos: 58





	head is a hospital (someone please tend to it)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from _House a Habit_ by We Are the Guests. Huge thanks to my betas, Jax and Layla!
> 
> * * *
> 
> _When is a monster not a monster?_   
>  _Oh, when you love it._   
>  _Oh, when you used to sing it to sleep._

“Dunno,” says Benten. “You’re asking the wrong person.” He is on the floor of the living room he shares with Juno, their breaths tiptoeing around the corners of open doors to remind Benten that he is not alone. Even though his head goes fuzzy on the bus or on the sidewalk to the bus because Juno won’t let him drive and he doesn’t trust himself enough to try, he is not alone. Juno stayed with him in the ER for a solid week, two weeks, nearly got discharged from the HCPD twice, while the defense attorney was putting together her talking points. 

He is on the floor, back to the couch cushion where Juno sits, stripping off his sweaty training shirt. The neon of the city superimposes every shape upon itself. Benten extends his toes and wiggles them just to see Juno’s reaction, which is a snort and an eyeroll. And a hand in Benten’s hair, soft and sure. That’s the part he wanted the most. 

Since the accident, Juno has been less of a closed fist and more of a warm hand in Benten’s hair, though Benten is sure that the moment the car door closes, Juno’s hands are clenched.

Benten tosses the shirt toward the bedrooms, and it falls solidly across Juno’s knees. Juno makes an exaggerated sound of disgust and drops it on Benten’s head. For a second, the apartment is neon and dark, then Benten straightens up enough to whack his brother with the shirt. 

“Don’t tell me you don’t have an opinion,” says Juno.

“No, no, I have one. Obviously. But I know you wouldn’t like it. Hence the tight lips. Also, I know what you’re going to say, and I can’t really argue with evidence like that.”

“What evidence?” sputters Juno. “Plus, you argue with everything. Why back off now?”

Benten shrugs. “Like your tragically stubborn but entirely predictable refusal to think you’re worthy of the promotion. You have no idea how compelling it is. Anyway, I’m turning on the TV. You sit there and tell me more of that HCPD gossip, and I’ll sit here and not tell you what to turn around and tell your boss tomorrow.”

“I said I’d think on it.”

“Lemme know when you come around.”

Juno sighs, and his hand pulls back from Benten’s hair. 

The apartment is still under Juno’s name alone, and even though Benten has been back in the studio, three-quarters of his time there has been spent getting back control of his body. Managing the pain, really, the tightness that lingers in his chest and spikes after fifteen minutes on his feet. Benten is talking about picking up his share of the rent, the electrical, the groceries, as soon as he’s back on his feet. As it stands, he’s burning through his sick days. Every time Benten brings it pulling his weight, Juno says, _It’s no big deal, seriously._ Juno says, _It’s the least I could do._ But he doesn’t want to be his brother’s burden. 

It’s not much of a future to look forward to, putting his name on the lease, but for Benten, it means he’s alive.

Juno says, “Better not get your hopes up.” 

While Benten fiddles with the monitor’s brightness (lowest setting, and he still has to squint to keep the headache out), Juno pours drinks in the kitchen. Ice falls tiny and sweet into glasses.

“I want that cocktail you make,” says Benten. “That frothy one with the—”

“Yep, uh huh, I know the one,” says Juno. “The one that takes me forever to make. You ask for the same thing every time. But you heard the doc: with the meds you’re on, it’s water for a week for you.”

“Aw, come on. I deserve a drink, and you know it,” Ben laughs. “Just multitask. You’ve seen this one before anyway.”

“If you count falling asleep multiple times in the middle of it seeing it before, sure, we’ll go with that.”

Between the headaches and the insomnia, Benten hasn’t slept through the night since the doctor took the drip out of his arm. The insomnia, at least, he’s had since childhood. While Juno lashed out, while Juno punched everything in punching range, Benten lost sleep. The inside of Benten’s head feels like steel wool, busy and sharp and tangled. He is thinking about dozing during the stream, thinking about leaving Juno to wake him up. He knows Juno would. He has woken in the night to see Juno in the doorway, backlit only by the kitchen’s nightlight, his face inscrutable but his body tense as he peers into the dark. He has woken late to find hot chocolate cooling on his bedside table. He has caught Juno’s worried eyes, just for a second before Juno turned them away.

He feels bad. He doesn’t want to be the reason Juno isn’t living his life. 

The opening shots fill the screen, but Benten blurs his eyes to look at shapes instead of faces. It is hard to focus on faces, hard to associate features with a bigger picture, and harder still to recognize his face in the mirror, even though he looks at it every day at the kitchen table and in the car. The same face except the keloid on his hairline above his ear, his hair still blaster-singed and short. At least on television he doesn’t have to meet another pair of eyes. He doesn’t have to remember who is who.

He was lucky, the doctors said. Every doctor who traipsed through his room said that. The laser scorched through his skull but barely touched the brain. His ears ring without pause but he was lucky.

“Anyway,” says Juno from the kitchen, “I’m not cut out for sergeant. I’m not cut out for overseeing or—I’m fine where I’m at. I’m doing good work.” Liquids pour and ice clinks and the stream flashes in front of Benten and none of it sticks.

Turning down the volume, Benten shrugs. He leans forward and wraps his hands around the soles of his feet, more a reflex than anything, sighing at the stretch. The light in the kitchen goes off and in the sudden darkness a headache flares behind Benten’s skull. He shuts his eyes but the disembodied audio shudders in his head.

Juno says, “You want the lights on or off?”

“On.”

So Juno turns the kitchen light on and the living room overhead for good measure. He sets the two glasses on the coffee table, both water, and Benten rests his knees against its side. 

“Speaking of. I know I can’t talk you out of TV, but take your pills so your head doesn’t keep you up all night,” says Juno gently, uncapping the pill bottle. This gentleness has been one of the hardest things to get used to, the way Juno’s voice softens when conversation slides back to the accident, the way he looks over Benten’s shoulder before Ben has the chance to do so himself, the way he double checks Benten’s schedule to make sure neither of them forget anything.

He made a dozen phone calls a day before Benten was discharged, a number for a trauma specialist packed among the belongings Juno had brought for him.

Juno went back for Benten’s things, so when it came time to drive Benten to the apartment they’d share, Benten wouldn’t have to see the old place. He filled up his car with them. He gave Benten his favorite sweaters to wear, but Benten had to take them off when the nurse changed the IV. But it was sweet of Juno.

And meanwhile the court date loomed over both of them. Benten ripped that month out of Juno’s old-fashioned wall calendar. It became a white space that Benten could not enter and could not walk out of, the white sheets, the tasteless food, the chest pains and dizziness, but if he couldn’t see it, he could pretend it was a room he had never seen inside of.

What Benten remembers the most is that Mom wasn’t there. The gun, the shuddering hand, the smoke a second before he realized the bolt had gone through him. The rattling of pills, or maybe teeth, as he hit the ground.

Juno sits beside Benten on the floor, taking a long sip from his glass. Benten sets the stream on the lowest volume and lets it play. He reaches out a hand and Juno places two pills on his palm. He swallows the tablets dry and leans his head back to rest on the couch cushion. “I think you’re cut out for it fine. You just don’t give yourself enough credit. Come on. Super Steel, rising through the ranks. Bad guys everywhere better look out.”

“I give myself plenty of credit,” says Juno in faux outrage. He twists and yanks the blanket from the back of the couch.

“Yeah?” says Benten. He fumbles for the glass and chugs. “You’re gonna show up tomorrow and say I’m sorry, I hate myself too much to accept, I’m gonna be a detective forever.”

“Just because you have big dreams,” Juno begins before catching himself. He sighs. “Just lay off, okay?” He drapes the blanket over his knees and Benten’s.

And Benten doesn’t want fall asleep angry, so he lays off. He mumbles, “’M sorry. You do you.”

“Yeah,” says Juno, and the miracle is that they can sit side-by-side with shoulders touching. The miracle is that even though Juno’s voice is swallowed by the ringing in Benten’s ears, they are not a city apart. The miracle is that he was lucky.

* * *

“Juno,” Benten says softly. He presses a hand to his face and it comes away damp with sweat. “Can you come get me?”

Juno’s voice is rough. Behind it, Ben can hear chattering, clicking – office stuff, he thinks. Police station shit. “What happened?” Like it’s an accusation at the world.

“I’m,” says Benten, and his voice is so weak. Juno sucks in a breath. 

It is Benten’s third class in as many weeks, and so far he has been determined to soldier through them. Even though the music he plays is at odds with the ringing in his head, even though he pauses during demonstrations to collect his breath, he owes it to his students to show up. He is talking with the studio about rescheduling his classes, about picking them all up again. His manager tells him to take all the time he needs, and he says, _I’m fine, I’m fine._

He put off calling Juno as long as he could, but despite the shame that accompanies the call, the more it looked like he wouldn’t make it to the bus, the more he had to weigh his options.

He is on the floor of the studio with his back to the mirror. All the lights are on, but the room is empty of people and their effects. The high windows look out on the parking lot. Benten keeps his eyes closed. His body aches.

“Nothing happened,” says Benten. In the empty studio, lit only by emergency lights and neon through the high windows, he sits with his back to the mirror. He can’t seem to steady his breathing. He doesn’t have a quick remark on his tongue, a moment of laughter. He doesn’t want to be seen.

“You call me in the middle of a class you’re leading for a ride home, so, yeah, I think something’s happened.”

Benten presses the heels of his hands against his eyelids. His lashes are damp. His breath is too loud in the empty studio, and the mirror reflects his body in the big empty space, and he knows his going through this alone. 

He pulls on his socks, focusing on the sensation of soft fabric sliding up his ankles. Even though he knows he shouldn’t, he cracks his toes in quick succession and sighs at the release of pressure. 

“I’m at work,” says Juno, and Benten waits for the follow-up: _Can’t you catch the bus or something?_ But there is a deep worry in his tone that he only affects around Benten. “How soon do you need me?”

“Um,” says Benten. “I sent the class home and closed up, but I don’t think—I don’t have the money for a bus.” It’s a lie, but his voice is soft and smooth. “So whenever you can get here.” He is trying not to be needy, to cook his own meals and take himself to work or the library or the physical therapist’s, but that doesn’t stop Juno’s worry. 

He pulls his sweatshirt over his leotard, but he can’t stand long enough to change into sweatpants. He shivers against the warm fabric. All around him, the studio grows. Its barre rises out of reach; its mirror distorts, and the wall shivers away from him. Benten is so small, and he is beginning to think he doesn’t belong here.

For years, the only thing he had that was his was his body, his choreo, his broken toes. He snuck to lessons he paid for with a charming smile and a quick tongue. Some days, when they were younger, when Benten was just learning to dance with a partner, Juno would catch the bus with him after school and sit for hours behind the desk in the lobby doing homework he’d let Mick Mercury copy the next morning. Mom knew where they were, of course; she had to have, though her tirades about curfew never held any disapproval, not about the dancing. Benten had never had to choose.

He was lucky.

Even now, even with the scar behind his temple and the physical therapy and the aches, he knows there was a time when he was lucky. Luckier than Juno, anyway. It’s hard not to think like that.

His PT told him to dance a little every day, no more than half an hour, so of course the first thing Benten did was book time in the studio. He reached out to his students. He dug through the unpacked garbage bags for his tights.

He spends hours in the studio, most of which he spends recovering from the exertion of dancing, hands on his knees or resting on the barre. He tiptoes down the dimly lit hall and refills his water bottles. He stretches his body loose and languid, until the burn becomes a pain he can’t ignore. He wants to feel alive.

Juno says, “I’ll be there. Just need to get someone to cover my shift. Don’t pass out or anything.”

“Have I ever?” laughs Benten, and they both go quiet, because of course he has. 

“I won’t,” Benten amends.

“I’ll see you in thirty,” says Juno, and the comms beep off.

Once this place felt like an extension of Benten’s body, a space he was born for, but now it just feels too bright. Benten packs his bag and slips on his shoes without tying them, and when he’s done, he folds in on himself and closes his eyes. The hiss never leaves his ears.

A sharp light comes in through the high windows almost exactly thirty minutes later, reflecting and searing through the studio, and a sharper honk follows.

“Yeah, yeah,” says Benten, and the studio echoes it back at him. The studio hisses like a monster, but Benten knows it isn’t the studio.

On shaking legs, something burning in his body and his brain, Benten grabs his bag and locks the studio door with fumbling fingers. Juno’s is the only car in the lot, five thirty p.m. and the sky light from the dome. 

Juno rolls down the window and raises his eyebrows. “Hey, good looking, want a ride?”

Benten barks out a laugh. It’s a line Mick said sometimes and Juno picked up, though sometimes _asshole_ was substituted for _good looking._

“Do you want to talk about it?” says Juno in the car. He doesn’t start the engine until Benten fastens his seatbelt. Benten drops his bag into the backseat and sighs heavily. Normally, Benten would laugh about it, but his eyes are dry and his body is heavy, so instead he reaches out to play with the dangling freshener. 

“It’s nothing. Overexerted myself, I guess. Lost my balance. Nothing a good night’s sleep won’t fix.” Already he is outside his body, watching himself lift the freshener off the mirror and slip it back, watching himself fall, his career ending in seconds.

“I told you not to go back so soon,” Juno huffs.

Benten waves a hand. “Yeah, yeah.” He almost says, _Mom,_ and catches himself just as the chill goes through him.

“You’re okay, though?” says Juno sharply.

Benten reclines his seat as far as it will go and closes his eyes. Instead of answering, he says, “Ugh. Yeah. ’Sides, I couldn’t abandon the kids.”

“You’re not abandoning them, but you have to look after yourself.”

Benten presses his lips together. “I’m fine, Juno, okay? I’m recovering from a trauma but it’s all right.” It is easy enough to say what the doctors have said, to repeat their words verbatim so that he doesn’t have to think too long about it.

“Call your therapist,” Juno says. His intense eyes on Benten are too much to look at.

“In the morning. Let a guy lick his wounds.”

The worry is apparent in Juno’s breathing, but he shrugs, says, “Okay,” and watches the road.

“It’s not,” Juno begins when he pulls into the parking garage beside their building. He crawls through, scanning for a spot. “You weren’t thinking about when it happened?”

Benten sighs. “Like a flashback? Nah. I don’t get those.”

Juno stares at him until Benten laughs and points ahead. “Look at the road!”

It happened like this: one moment Benten was demonstrating a step, slow and drawn-out, and the next moment the ringing was a physical thing in his body. He was catching himself on the mirror, his vision spinning, his body just a heavy thing falling through space.

 _I’m sorry,_ he said, his teeth gritted. He put on a smile and it felt like crying. _I’ll make it up to you. Next week. Promise._

Benten rests his temple against the window. The car rumbles over the uneven streets, Juno’s hands light on the wheel. “It’s not your fault.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Juno.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s not your fault.”

And when they get home, while Benten fills three glasses of water and drinks them in quick succession, Juno moves the sofa up against the wall. Benten struggles to keep his eyes open, the apartment looks different. Too close, or much farther away. Juno breathes heavily as he slides the coffee table up against the wall too. An empty space opens up in the middle of the room. Juno steps back and appraises the space.

“What are you doing?” says Benten.

“I’m giving you,” Juno grunts, “a studio.”

* * *

_“Goddamn it, Ben, look at me. Look at me.”_

_“I’m looking.” Half a whisper. The air a haze; two shapes that could be the same shape shivering in front of him; a hand in the dark. His own hand, limp at his side and sticky with blood. I’m looking._

_“Get the hell away from him!” It’s not for him, but it hits just the same. Juno is still talking and Benten is trying to get out of his own body._

_“You’re walking out of this, Benzaiten. You’d goddamn better.” The sharp fade, the blackened apartment, his mother’s black eyes over him and the black muzzle of the gun, too close to dodge._

_Too close to know that’s what hit him._

_Her eyes said, Juno, Juno. Her eyes said love and her voice said love and her finger on the trigger, also, said love._

_And for a moment, Benten knew what it felt like to be Juno. How to look out of his eyes, all the world reddened, and see a mouth full of teeth._

_“Look at me. Keep looking.” The comms beeping, that clinical voice saying What’s your emergency? and Juno saying Damn it, damn it, god fucking damn it._

_Juno saying, My brother, I need you here ASAP, he’s shot and I can’t lose him._

_Everything coming from a planet away, from a distant star. Juno frantic and Benten thinking, Why?_

* * *

It is hard enough to sleep without seeing that smoking muzzle behind his eyelids. It is hard enough to see Juno’s blaster hanging on its holster in the hall closet or over the back of a kitchen chair, and to keep living anyway.

It is hard, too, not to watch that holster every time Juno passes it, waiting for the moment his brother fits his finger against the trigger and doesn’t care what setting it’s on. It would be so easy: a gun instead of a fist, a gun instead of a mouth, the gun half an inch from Benten’s temple.

Benten startles when Juno’s comms buzz with a reminder of the court date crawling closer and closer. He startles when a cabinet slams. He startles when Juno drops his heavy shoes to the floor. Juno doesn’t say a word about it, but he notices. He catches cabinets before they close, sits on the floor to untie his boots, knocks before entering Benten’s room.

And still the gunshot ripped through Benten’s ears. Still, point blank, he fell back against the wall. Still the door opening, and opening, and a stream of people coming in and his mother looking at him with those unreadable eyes, but if she was saying _I’m sorry,_ Benten didn’t hear her.

_My boy, my baby, my little monster._

_That’ll show Juno, don’t you think?_

Her voice a lullaby. Everyone else’s voices faded out, cops and EMTs fumbling in the small apartment, Juno screaming his voice raw, Mom getting smaller and smaller and then the door frame blacking her out. His whole body hot with blood, his head throbbing while he faded out, the pain sliding away.

Her hand on his face, one last time. The door closing. The muzzle closing over his mouth. 

* * *

He dances in the studio Juno made for him out of the living room. When he’s not on duty, Juno sits on the couch and watches. Juno is familiar enough with the tenets of ballet that he can call Benten’s form. He does more stretches than steps, and his lines feel all wrong, though without a mirror, he can’t always tell. 

And every evening, Juno pulls out the sofa bed and fluffs those ugly couch pillows and makes the bed anew. It cuts off Benten’s space, but it reminds him to try to sleep.

Juno starts talking about moving out of Oldtown, about finding a nice two-bedroom that will belong to him and Benten from the start. Benten says this place is okay, but he’s been sleeping in Juno’s bed for a month and he knows that can only last so long. Benten says the studio’s here, the station’s here, and Juno says, “I’ve always wanted to commute.”

* * *

“Don’t,” says Juno. “Just this once, can’t you use your brain?” He has been following Benten from room to room, shouting and pleading. 

Benten buttons up his jacket, biting his lip. “My brain is the issue, yes. Anyway, it’s my choice, and I have the appointment already.”

“It’s a stupid choice,” Juno says. “It wouldn’t kill you to back out.”

Benten says, “I can’t go to this thing mad, okay, so rip into me when we get back.”

It is hard to look at Juno, his eyes bright with outrage, two minutes home from work and probably two minutes from sending Benten to meet the devil he knows with ten creds for the bus. 

And then, though his eyes don’t change, he backs down. “Just… be careful, okay?”

Benten laughs. “When am I not?”

“You have to stop saying things like that. We both know you’re doing a shitty job taking care of yourself and I worry about you every day and you still want to crawl back to the woman who tried to kill you.”

The laugh turns into a giggle, Benten’s last line of defense. “I’ll be careful. Promise.”

“You won’t believe a word she says?”

“I can take care of myself.”

Juno’s hand closes around Benten’s upper arm hard enough to ache. “If you could take care of yourself, Benzaiten, you wouldn’t have been shot.” The fire in Juno’s voice reaches his eyes, wild and animal. And scared. “I wouldn’t have almost lost you. You wouldn’t have been in the hospital for two and a half weeks while I worried sick about you and gave a dozen statements to a dozen different lawyers and wardens and doctors—” 

Benten’s hands close into fists. Slowly, he releases them. The apartment is too small and Juno is too close and the thought of Mom enough to tear all of Benten’s thoughts to shreds.

And then he tells Juno the truth: “She needs me.”

Juno barks out a laugh. “She gave that right up a long time ago.”

“If it’s a mistake, it’s mine to make, Juno.”

“It’s not gonna give you any closure, you know that, right?” Juno says. It rings like a heartbeat, soft and sure, and Benten stops, slipping his house keys into his pocket.

“Yeah, whatever,” says Benten.

* * *

In the end, Juno drives Benten to the penitentiary. He drops Benten off outside and pulls quickly away, some gruff remark about _not letting you go in alone_ and a salute and a comms call in to work where he’s out sick for the day, just to sit around and wait for Benzaiten to have a conversation he is already regretting signing up for.

* * *

_Mom, behind glass, her washed-out eyes weary and dark, doesn’t try to smile when Benten sits down. Her voice is a worn-out whisper. She says, You look so good. Healthy. He says, No thanks to you, but he shivers while he says it._

_Benten on his belly before her; Benten a monster under his own bed._

_There is art on the walls and big reinforced windows through which the afternoon light filters in, brown as clotted blood. Benten keeps buttoning and unbuttoning his jacket. Even with the glass between them, bulletproof and so thick he can’t hear her voice through it. The comms on the table echo in his head._

_He wants to know what she looks like unarmed. He wants to know if she is repentant. He wants to see her, but he doesn’t know what he’s looking for._

_She is so small, an echo herself. Her hair is pulled neatly back. Her hands, her long fingers, twist around themselves in her lap._

_And Benten doesn’t feel powerful. He just feels tired._

Are you sorry? _Juno would ask._ Do you have something to say to me? _But Mom’s lip quivers and Benten can’t bring himself to say it. He says, instead, I’m sorry._

_Mom laughs, her voice a dizzy ringing. You’re sorry? For what?_

_Benten looks away, but he can still feel Mom’s eyes on him. On the space above his ear. He can feel the way he unbecomes a person in front of her. He can feel himself shrinking, the pieces of him sliding away. She looks straight through him, every broken inch of him separated from her by half an inch of glass._

_She says, When it was just us, you would sing me lullabies. She laughs, sweet and stinging as Martian rain, while her voice goes wistful. When one of us couldn’t sleep, do you remember those conversations? Do you know how much they meant to me?_

_He remembers, of course, nights in the living room or the kitchen, his mother’s old hurts laid out for him like candy, stories sweet as silver. The quiet tenderness of it, the thin ache it left behind._

_She says, You stayed with me. You didn’t leave. She says it like it was some sort of miracle. Benten is waiting for her to say, Why? He is waiting for Juno, in some parking lot six blocks away, to ask him why._

_He studies his mother and he doesn’t know how to feel, terror and tenderness coiling inside him._

_Do you forgive me, baby? Mom says. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I never wanted to hurt you._

_He places his fingers on the keloid, and it is so hot it burns him. For a second, he imagines it’s her fingers, digging in, breaking his skull anew._

_You wanted him dead, he says._

_That’s not true, baby. That’s not true._

_And maybe some of Juno’s anger has rubbed off on him, because he says, I don’t know that._

_Do you forgive me?_

_Benten whispers it: I don’t know. It comes out choked. He is rising, rising. He is falling to the floor in front of her, and it is happening at the same time. Someone puts their hands under his shoulders to keep him up. Someone escorts him to the front desk, to the curb where he sits with his knees pulled up and his hands over his ears and tries to breathe. He gives himself this second to fall apart. Stinging behind his eyes, stinging between his temples, stinging like HD audio flickering from one side of his skull to the other. The sudden hotness, the shock, the way her face grew more and more triumphant the longer she thought about the kill. Burning, warlike, the gun a trophy in her hands. His head a trophy in his own hands._

_Hands he’d almost convinced himself were harmless._

_Someone says, Are you okay? Are you okay? Faceless, ringing. And Benten doesn’t say yes._

* * *

In the car, he says, “I was so stupid.” His voice shakes, and he can feel his heartbeat in his chest. Every time he blinks, he sees Mom’s unkempt face, the deep bags beneath her eyes, the hollows of her cheeks, those long fingers made for holding pens and also, now, triggers. He looked at them and all he could see was the violence.

He puts his feet on the dash and watches the air freshener spin like a pendulum. He thinks of asking it a question. _Should I forgive her?_ sounds like a start. This is not the first time he has run up against that question. In his dreams, she is reaching a hand out, and he is about to take it when he realizes her palm opens up like a gun, safety cocked. In his dreams, he is running after Juno clad in his HCPD navy, but when Juno turns around, Benten is staring at himself. In his dreams, Juno is holding the gun to Benten’s temple, and he only wakes up after the crack.

If the courts find Mom not guilty, if she gets out, if she goes back to that apartment red with his blood, could he knock on the door? Could he say, It was worth it to stay?

His body isn’t his and his brain isn’t his and he keeps telling himself he’s lucky, but mostly he’s just tired. Mostly he can’t remember what led up to it, the flash of the gun, a voice saying _Where are they?_ He can’t remember the moment her face turned sour. But he knew, a second before she squeezed the trigger, what was going to happen, felt the impact a second before it shredded him.

“Aren’t you mad?” says Juno, so flat it could be a blow. Benten turns from the crowded, glittering views of Oldtown to look at him.

“What?” 

Juno taps the wheel insistently. “Mad. Aren’t you?”

Benten’s tone comes out languid and smooth. “Why would I be mad? Unless you’re talking about the interior design of that place. The acoustics were terrible.”

“Goddamn it, Benten, take something seriously for once in your life.”

“Sure, sure,” says Benten with a shrug. He rolls down the window, and the wind, even at the inner-city crawl, pulls his voice away from him. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay,” says Juno. “Okay.”

And when Benten says, “Thanks for driving me,” Juno doesn’t look at him.

* * *

“I took the promotion,” Juno says. There is no triumph in his voice, just the sort of weariness that makes him sound a decade older than he is, while he sizzles chicken blocks on the stove. Benten chops garlic, careful with his fingers, his strokes unsteady, while the kitchen fills up with warmth. It is nice to have enough fresh food to cook with, garlic and onion and oil heady in the cramped space, their bodies burning with it. Even after Juno left and Benten took over the grocery runs, he never had enough fresh ingredients to make meals from scratch.

“You did?” Benten giggles.

“I could do some real good with it. Garlic.”

Benten hands him the cutting board and Juno scrapes its contents into the pan.

“I’m pretty sure you put the garlic in first,” says Benten, peering over his shoulder.

“Who cares? Food’s food. Now get off me before I hit you with this spatula.”

“You took the job.” Benten can’t keep the glee out of his voice.

“Yeah, and lay off about it.” The gruffness of Juno’s tone can’t keep out his pride, shy as it is.

“Lay off?” Benten laughs. Juno laughs, too, but it’s self-conscious.

“Yeah. Don’t make a big deal about it.”

Benten has a class later, his third class of the week, and he hasn’t burnt out yet. The ringing hasn’t left his ears once, but he is learning to sleep with it, and Juno lets him stay up with streams so long as he keeps them quiet and agrees to take the sofa bed. Benten has woken many times on the unmade sofa with cramped knees. He has to hold onto the barre more than he used to, but for his classes he only has to hold himself together long enough to demonstrate a sequence. Tonight, Juno is off for the evening, his holster hung over one of the kitchen chairs, dressed down in an undershirt and sweats.

Juno has been talking about going for a skirt next time he goes shopping. His voice goes soft and unsure and giddy every time he brings it up, glancing over his shoulder as if waiting for a scolding. Benten has been saying he’ll go with. A second pair of eyes, if Juno wants. Juno rolls that around in his head and says _Sure, why not?_

When Juno’s comms buzz, he hands the spatula to Benten. It’s probably work, some last emergency hitting Oldtown while Juno is still a detective, so Benten takes the spatula and considers the pan.

Juno says, “Juno Steel.” But then his tone changes. “Yes? That’s us, yeah. Uh huh? Um, I’ll pass it along. Yeah, I’ll ask him, okay?” With every word, his voice gets a shade lower, a shade colder. 

“Ben,” says Juno, and that’s when the shivers hit. Benten has a comms but he hasn’t answered anything that isn’t from his doctor’s in a week—too many people wanted to offer their sympathy, too many old friends wanted a piece of the story—and suddenly he is hit by the fear that someone called Juno as a workaround. 

Benten’s voice is high and strained. “What?”

“You know what?” Juno says, and Benten doesn’t know whether he’s talking to him or the mystery caller. “I’m gonna have to get back to you on that one. Yeah, for both of us. Thanks. Yeah, you too. Night.”

The sharp beep echoes through the house as Juno reenters the kitchen. Benten has one second to breathe before Juno says, sharply, “I told you to watch the chicken, not burn it.”

Benten looks at the pan and notices it for the first time, the spatula light in his hand. He passes it over to Juno without a word. Juno flips the chicken, sighing.

“Okay,” says Benten, keeping his voice airy, “what was it?”

“Oh, the, uh. When I called the ambulance, I might have told someone I might, I _might,_ be willing to be a witness.”

Benten’s body goes stiff. The warm kitchen goes cold in a second. “And they want both of us to testify.”

“Pretty much.” It isn’t a voice so much as a release of air.

Benten turns away from Juno and presses his fingertips against his temple. He rubs the scar, biting his lip.

“You okay?” says Juno.

“Yeah, I’m—yeah.” A courtroom packed with people who knew Benten by name without having ever heard him speak, his accident the talk of the town for a week, a public statement by Mom’s old employer North Star. Mom in ordinary clothes two yards away from him, looking at him with his eyes. He’s seen enough streams to know how this goes, read enough books – movie nights with high school friends or cinemas he and Juno snuck into without paying. 

And as he looks at Juno, he wonders: what does Juno want him to do? What kind of brother does Juno want? A boy who will go to bat, who will fight until his voice gives out, a boy who can wear a pressed shirt and speak without stuttering and say _She did this, and this is why_? Or the boy sinking now to the kitchen floor, small and shivering? 

Even now, it is hard to see himself as a child, his limbs too long, his head too full of dark rooms.

“I can’t,” Benten tells his knees. The sound coming out of him might be laughter. And then, because he feels he has to explain himself to Juno, he says, “I don’t think I’d—I don’t think I’d say the right thing.”

Juno reaches out to him and then stops, his hand brushing the tips of Benten’s hair. “That’s what I figured. But I didn’t want you to have to make the decision on the spot.”

“Not a hard decision,” Benten tells him.

“Yeah.”

The space between Benten and Juno is a desert, vast and hungry, but when Juno’s hand falls on Benten’s shoulder, he doesn’t shake it off. It is warm and firm, and the chicken sizzles above his head. The cold of the tile seeps into the soles of his feet. He reaches up and takes Juno’s fingers.

“It’s okay,” says Juno roughly. “You’re okay.”

The question lingers in the air between them. Juno’s hand shakes slightly as he flips the chicken, and then the stove goes quiet. _What would you say instead?_ Juno sits on the floor beside Benten without letting go of his hand.

“I hope she gets prison for life for attempted filicide.” It sounds rehearsed, Juno’s tone flat and sure.

Benten pulls his knees up and hooks his free hand around them, dropping his cheek onto his knee. “Please, Juno.”

“It’s true.” Determined as always to get the last word.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Juno says, “I don’t understand you.” 

And Benten laughs. “Yeah, me neither.”

* * *

The first time Juno gets his heart broken, the relationship four months old and Juno mostly tight-lipped about it at home except for those helpless smile, except the way his voice goes soft and yearning, Benten swings by the convenience store and brings home half the freezer’s worth of ice cream. His own money, none of Juno’s. Benten has never met the beau, but the way Juno’s eyes look hollowed out starts something burning in Benten.

That’s how Benten found out, that morning in the car at the bus stop, Juno idling while Benten gathered his things. Juno was quiet all morning, quiet during the whole two-minute ride to the bus stop because he insisted on going the extra mile, even though Benten could handle the walk. Benten said, _You look positively heartsick._ And Juno said, _Yeah, well, that’s because I am._ And the bus honked behind them, so Benten popped the door and got out.

Juno takes the ice cream and says, “Isn’t this a little much?”

“What?”

“I didn’t get dumped.”

“Oh. Okay. So you want me to return these?”

Juno grins a vicious grin. A grin like that is meant for blood, Benten thinks, and then his head goes somewhere he doesn’t want it to. Juno says, “Nah. I’ll finish them if you don’t want ’em.”

So Benten brings some spoons over and sets the whole affair on Juno’s lap. Juno is tight-lipped, a melancholy set to his brow, his comms face-down on the coffee table, but he devours the ice cream as though he’d never tasted anything half as sweet.

By the end of the night, their freezer is filled with half-eaten tubs of ice cream and Juno is passed out face-down on the couch. After putting the last tub away, Benten unfolds a heavy blanket from where Juno keeps his bedding beside the couch and lays it over Juno. Dead man’s float, Benten thinks, and wonders what movie he picked the phrase up from. Juno’s spine visible through his shirt, his hand brushing the carpet, the television running softly. Benten flicks it off. He goes through the house slowly, turning off lights with the deliberation of a kid blowing out birthday candles. The heavy dark settles in. 

Benten goes into Juno’s bedroom. There is something unbearable about the fact that its overhead is the only light in the apartment, Juno breathing slow and steady in the other room, the heavy tread of Benten’s heart. 

It took months for Benten to convince Juno to take back his bed, to leave Benten the sofa, months of downplaying his symptoms, months of saying, _I can’t take this from you forever._ He enters and it feels like a breach.

Juno keeps things neat: his drawers pushed in, just his uniform discarded on the floor beside his hamper. Several framed photos Benten doesn’t recognize decorate the top of the wardrobe. Juno smiling with work friends, not the smile that means _I’m not okay_ but the one that says _I want to be here,_ holding them by the shoulders, pulling them in, in the photo’s approximation of movement, toward him. Juno must have put them on display recently.

There is a picture of Juno at the shooting range, his blaster held out with locked elbows, his tongue between his teeth and noise-canceling headphones around his neck. A picture of him in uniform leaning out the driver’s window of a squad car, his tongue out, one hand raised in a flippant gesture. Benten can almost feel the wind rustling his hair, the cocky satisfaction on Juno’s face.

There is nothing from before.

Benten brushes his teeth, strips off his socks, and crawls into Juno’s unmade bed in his clothes. He sets Juno’s alarm and stares out the window at Oldtown’s flickering neon.

* * *

That isn’t the only time Juno comes home heartbroken.

Juno bites his tongue more than he tells Benten what’s going on, cautious as always about baring his heart too openly, even for his brother, as though he is protecting Benten from the one thing he can. The only thing left. 

The busier Benten gets with the studio, the busier Juno gets with his new job, the more they see each other only in the transitory moments between commutes or during meals. Benten must have known growing up felt like this, losing out more and more each day on the people he loves, but it hurts.

It’s breakfast and Juno is wolfing down a bowl of cereal. Benten is studying Juno, letting his cereal get soggy. Benten says, “Are you sure about this?”

Juno speaks with a full mouth. “About what, Ben?”

Benten cracks his shoulders. “Getting your heart broken every two weeks.”

“It’s not like that,” Juno shoots back. “People are hard, but she’s good. She’s a good person, and she’s good to me.”

“Is she?” asks Benten.

“Yeah.” It comes out sharp, and Juno looks apologetic, but he carries on. “Yeah, she is. I’ve had enough taking shit from people and I know when I’m being treated badly.”

“I know that,” Benten says. If he lets himself think about it, he admires Juno’s ability to make a clean break, to shrug his legacy off his shoulders and put his foot in another, more desirable door, but it’s not something he could ever put into words. 

“I’m gonna tell you the truth,” Juno says. Benten leans in, a chill in his arms from the chill in Juno’s voice. “The first… fight. The first time we fought. I thought that was the end of the world. I thought… surely, I thought, she could never love me after that. There I went, sticking my foot out too far, tripping too many people on their way past me, leaving a goddamn mess in my wake. If she saw me for what I was, that would be it.”

“What do you mean, what you are?”

Juno continues as if Benten hadn’t said anything. “It wasn’t even really a fight, just a few raised voices in a private office. I don’t even remember what it was about.” From the guilt on his face, though, he does remember, and he thinks it’s his fault. He isn’t looking at Benten. “And I was scared.”

“Of her?”

“No. I was scared because I don’t want to be another link in a chain of people who hurt her.” 

“And what about you?” says Benten. “What about the people who hurt you?”

Juno’s face is so blank it hurts, carefully, uneasily blank. “They’re either in jail or they don’t remember my name.”

“You were scared of her,” Benten presses.

Juno sighs. He tips his bowl and drains the milk, slurping, his eyes closed. When he’s finished, he slides the bowl to the side, but he still doesn’t look at Benten. 

Benten says, “Do you know the answer?” and something twists in Juno’s face.

“All that anger,” Juno whispers. “You know? And then it was gone. Then everything was okay, and she said it was just a bump in the road, and I thought, god, is that what the road feels like? Am I gonna feel like that every time someone’s brow twitches? All those guns. You could drown in the number of charges in that building. You have to understand.”

Benten nods. He closes his eyes and nods. He spins his soggy cereal in the bowl in front of him, but he can’t think of eating. “I definitely understand some of that,” he concedes. He doesn’t know how to say, _Every time I see your gun I think about how it would feel pointed at me. I can imagine the shock, the bang, the pain. I feel it all._

_And your face, full of rage; your face, going slack. The promise of pain in our blood._

_I’m sorry,_ he wants to say. _I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have to go through that too._

He wonders if there is any version of the world in which he could have spared Juno. If he could have spared himself.

“Anyway,” says Juno, who can’t read minds. “I’ve got a date tonight, and I was thinking of going in that new dress and maybe trying that smoky eye. I want everyone to see me and know I’m her lady.”

Benten raises an eyebrow and Juno raises his back, so they’re at a stalemate. But Benten doesn’t say anything.

Over the months, Juno has grown more comfortable in dresses. He sees himself in the bathroom mirror and beams. He spins his hips to make the fabric fly out. He discards every piece of makeup advice Benten gives him and opts for video tutorials. He says it isn’t the dresses that help him feel like himself, but the freedom they afford him to figure out who that person is.

Benten is looking for that undercurrent of guilt, and he finds it, but he doesn’t say a word about it to Juno.

And sometimes, when Juno has his back to Benten in the kitchen or at the television, or when he’s on the comms with his one and only, Benten handles his gun. He takes it out of its holster and, careful that its safety is on and that it’s set to stun, he spins it around in his hands. This is not what his mother’s gun looked like, or at least he doesn’t think it is. In his hand, it is so heavy, smooth and blocky and industrial. Here where the finger presses as gently as a kiss to an eyelid; here the hole where the light comes out, a black hole in reverse. He holds it in front of him, keeping his fingers far away from the trigger, and squints. He imagines firing. Imagines the collateral, blood on the walls, blood sticky on the carpet, and Juno’s footprints messing up the crime scene.

(Someone in the front hall talking in a low voice to Juno, saying, _We have the fingerprints, but your boots_.) 

Benten holds the gun and his body is so sure, his arms stretched out, his back straight. He understands why it makes Juno feel powerful. Safe.

And then Juno turns around and the moment is over, and Benten is just a boy with head trauma holding the weapon that almost killed him, and he is ashamed.

* * *

So Benten flirts too. He chats up his coworkers. His hair grows out, though when he pins it back to dance, his scar is on full display, the hairline forever altered. Juno says he just has to own it.

For a while, Benten and Juno were tit-for-tat on scars – Benten’s caused by the trouble he got into, Juno’s by the punishment. Tumbling off chain link, falling in the sewers, tiptoeing across defunct billboards, dizzy and drunk. Now all Juno’s scars come from line-of-duty work and Benten’s come from. Well.

It is hard to look at his face and not see the muzzle, the heavy bubble of light inside it, so when Benten isn’t dancing, he keeps his hair long over his ear.

He pays for a dancing coach out of pocket and takes a few classes with adults and thinks about what Juno said about moving out of Oldtown. He does his stretches and wonders what the beautiful parts of the city look like. He flirts with dancers in their early twenties and sometimes they get as far as making out in the single-stall bathroom. Sometimes they get farther. Tongues all over his neck, legs between his knees, someone hoisting him up against the wall and yanking down his tights.

It makes him feel alive. Proves that his body is still living. 

He doesn’t tell Juno about it unless Juno asks, and mostly Juno doesn’t, because Benten doesn’t come home starstruck. He saves the stars for when something is happening.

And still Juno has the same tales of wonder and woe, of love and longing. Benten has never gone steady with anyone and can’t sympathize, which he tells Juno emphatically.

But he’s happy for Juno. It’s hard not to be with that grin Juno goes around with, though every time Benten mentions it, Juno says, “I’d know if my face was doing something like that.”

“Uh huh,” says Benten with a smirk. 

* * *

Juno gets busier, and Benten walks himself to the bus more and more often. He shoulders the grocery runs and balances the budget. It is familiar, comfortable. He takes long walks through the city, and sometimes he hops on a bus bound for uptown and wanders around until it gets dark and Juno calls his comms thrice in a row. He is relearning the sounds of the city now that they are blurred by the ringing in his ears, and he is trying to draw a map in his head that he can remember. 

On Juno’s off day, however, Juno catches Benten before he leaves. “I’ve got something I want to show you,” says Juno.

In the car, Juno turns down several roads Benten has rarely traveled by, so Benten begins to have suspicions. Still, he lets Juno drive to the point in the road where the two domes converge, the airlock sucking them out of Oldtown. Benten raises his eyebrows, but Juno makes a show of keeping his eyes on the road.

In a pointed voice, Benten says, “What is this?”

“An apartment viewing.” Juno’s triumphant voice fills the car. He slams the heel of his hand against the wheel. “Don’t worry, it won’t take you away from your studio. It’s close by. You could practically walk.”

Juno takes another sharp turn and parks neatly against the curb. “What do you think?”

It’s an old building, its architecture similar to that found in Oldtown, five stories tall with window gardens and an ornate grate before the front door. It looks like a building other people would live in.

The tour takes less than fifteen minutes, Juno asking questions about rates and heating and wall thickness and Benten looking at the corners, wondering why its inhabitants left and where they are now. He is trying to figure out how to fit this apartment into the life he’s figured out for himself, the routine commute to work and back home, the pleasant hours in parks or in the library or sometimes in cinemas he pays for himself. Maybe it’s time to take a second job, he thinks. He forgets his choreo sometimes, so he’s learned to take notes. He brings notes to class. He calls in sick once a week for the migraines, and sometimes he miscalculates his movements, but everything considered, he’s as strong as he ever was, and almost in the prime of his life.

Afterward, they sit in the car for a long time before Juno starts the engine. 

“So?” Juno asks, that reckless, familiar grin in his voice.

“Sure seems like a place someone could live in,” Benten tells him, but he rises to it anyway. He grins. He laughs. He lets it slide over his face like a mask, lets them both grow giddy with the thought of owning their own place somewhere nobody knows their faces, where they could come home after a long day of work and just be Benten and Juno, not Benten and Juno Steel. Of sitting in that bare living room filled with their own furniture, of having two bedrooms across a cramped hall from each other, of leaving their doors open and tossing socks at each other’s heads until someone got cramps laughing. It could be so much simpler than this, than the cramped, warped kitchen and a sofa bed that touches the far wall when extended, than a view he recognizes every morning and can’t shake every night.

So why doesn’t he want to leave? Why does Oldtown weigh in his blood? Why can he imagine belonging to no streets other than these?

Juno says, “Come on, it’s not like you to shut out something new,” and he reaches out to ruffle Benten’s hair. Benten leans into the touch, but the moment Juno’s hands near his temple, he draws in a breath.

“I’m sorry,” Juno says, and it takes Benten back to the beginning. 

To avoid answering, Benten says, “I’ll think about it, okay?”

“You’d better.”

But Benten keeps his eye on the front door as long as he could. And when the building vanishes around the corner, it feels like loss.

* * *

He falls in the living room. He falls against the mirror. He falls into the bus and catches himself on the till. He falls in the car and catches himself on Juno. 

His PT says this is normal but Benten says it’s been months and he should be better by now. 

It was just a graze, he says. He was lucky.

* * *

And when he tumbles in the shower, the door is locked. Juno has to blast the handle to get in, and Benten is conscious enough that it sends his heartbeat stuttering. He is huddled when Juno finds him, naked, his hands over his eyes as though the tendons of his fingers could keep blaster fire out.

Juno raises him slowly, helps him into his clothes, speaking to him all the while. Benten thinks Juno is speaking, because his mouth is moving, but Benten can’t hear anything through the ringing in his head. His hands keep shaking. 

Juno’s ministrations are tender, motherly. He doesn’t let go of Benten once, not when he throws his heaviest coat over Benten’s shoulders, not when he fumbles for his keys, not in the elevator or the parking lot and barely to let Benten get into the car. He drives with his hands tight on the wheel, muttering something like _Squad car’d get us there quicker,_ and mostly Benten feels nothing at all. Hyperion City is neon and serrated and all he can think of is eyes. Every eye on him.

He tried not to read the news, though Juno read all of it. Juno fumed in the apartment over misrepresentations, over sensationalized depictions of a scene no one else had seen, over sympathetic words toward Sarah and hollow condolences toward Benten. Once, Benten was curious enough to pull up an article on his own comms, but every word was a dark room. Every heartbeat was a dark room. He sat in that dark room for an hour until Juno got home and asked why he looked like he’d seen a ghost.

And Benten had said, _Do I count as the ghost?_

There was no shared laughter that could get them past that.

* * *

The second hospital is grimmer than the first, or maybe just a grimmer wing. He’s only there for a night, dozing while Juno chats with the doctor.

Benten doesn’t pay attention to it. He keeps his eyes closed and think about the implications, his body giving out on him, about the fact that he doesn’t know what happened to his skull. How it healed. What it looks like now. He lies still for the exam and closes his eyes when the doctor explains. It’s late and he is so tired. But Juno takes notes. He asks questions. Benten knows Juno will fill him in later, in terms he can understand.

He dozes in the car on the way back, too. When Juno pulls into their parking garage, Benten can barely open his eyes. He mumbles and Juno says, “Come on, let’s get you to bed.” It’s midday—Benten slept to noon—and the lights burn through his closed eyelids. 

In the apartment, Benten turns every light off and falls onto the sofa bed, still made with last night’s sheets. He stumbles and almost misses, but Juno catches him by his elbows and lowers him carefully. While Benten slides under the covers, Juno heads into the kitchen.

A concussion, Juno says as he pulls jam out of the fridge. Dizziness caused by his injury – depth perception, loss of balance, the slick surface of the shower. “Do you want something to eat?”

“I could go for a bite,” Benten laughs, because he has to laugh. “So I take it I’m not dying.”

Juno looks at him with an unreadable expression. “No, I don’t think you are. I do think you need to be more careful, though.”

In a small voice, Benten asks, “Did he say anything about dancing?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not—I’m not supposed to _not_ do it, right?”

Juno’s eyes catch his and hold them, searching. Benten can’t decide if Juno’s found what he’s looking for, so he says, in a voice that tears through his chest, “It’d be such a shame to be washed up at nineteen.”

Juno hands him a plate. Benten lifts the sandwich, but his stomach is turning too much to eat.

Juno says, “You don’t have to give it up, no. But you do have to be careful. I’m your brother; I get to tell you that.”

“I get to decide whether to listen.”

“Benten.” His voice is so low it’s almost dangerous – not a threat, but enough to chill. Benten shrugs off Juno’s jacket and pulls off his own shirt. Juno holds out a hand, saying, “Give them to me.” So Benten does, and still the light pours through.

“Can you get the blinds?” he says around a mouthful of pb&j.

Juno nods curtly and sets about closing the blinds on every window. Benten can see the tension in Juno’s body, the way he holds his shoulders tight, the way he angles his chest. If nothing else, because he is a dancer, Benten knows bodies. He knows Juno even when the dark comes in and his headache fades, and he knows Juno’s worry. How often growing up did Juno’s brow pinch like this? How often did he shove his shoulder between Benten and the world? How many times did Benten not say, _Let me fight my own battles,_ even though he wanted to? 

And this: how often did he want to?

The War ended but Benten’s war kept going. He kept his chin up; he smiled. He laughed like it was his last line of defense against the world, and most of the time it was. He threw a hundred second punches while his brother shook out his knuckles. Every room was a battlefield, which meant he was always at a disadvantage. 

“If I’m gonna have to stop,” Benten says slowly, “I want to dance every second I have. I don’t want to regret it.”

“That’s a nice sentiment, but if you keep this up, you’re going to kill yourself.” Juno sits beside Benten on the couch, and Benten rests his temple against Juno’s shoulder. The contact brings Benten back into his body. He splays his fingers on his knees and studies them. What do hands have to look like to pull a trigger, he wonders? Is the hand that holds the barre the same hand that fingers the gun? 

Does he recognize himself?

Benten closes his eyes, and in the manufactured dark he can make a confession. The city goes on around them, unaware of the trip to the hospital, unaware of his tumbles, unaware of the way the gun looked in front of him, shining, like a firework or the white of an eye. The city roars and chatters and squeals and laughs.

That wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was his mother’s hands. The worst part was that she would use them to the full extent of their ability. That even if she hadn’t meant to hurt him, she had meant to hurt. 

That he would be hurt either way.

That he was lucky.

“It’s not just ‘something I love,’” he tells his brother. “It’s my lifeline. I don’t know what I’d be—what I am—without it.” His voice is light, almost careless, like he’s throwing the words into the air like so much discarded clothing. He tenses his shoulders against the coming disapproval.

But Juno says, “I’m not telling you to stop.”

“Yeah,” says Benten, his voice light and high. Careless. “When you started at the academy, when it was just us—me and Mom—things were good. I mean, as good as they could have been. She yelled less, or at least she yelled less at me. And I was…” He is going to say _useful,_ but it catches in his throat.

“What are you saying?” Juno says softly. Benten bristles at this quiet dismissal; it fills his mouth. He bites his lip until the sting makes him gasp, but the gasp is a shudder.

“Hey,” says Juno in a soft voice. “Hey. You’re okay.” His hand is around Benten’s shoulder before Benten can breathe. Benten swallows and nods. 

“You’re okay,” Juno says again, and it sounds like it could be true. It sounds like, _You’re alive._

“I got to know her,” Benten says, slowly. “She let me in.”

It is more momentous to say it than to think it. It takes the breath out of him.

“I sang her lullabies when neither of us could sleep,” he continues. “I think it’s hereditary, you know? The insomnia. We’d stay up and talk and I got to see a whole different side of her. And she was just a person.” There are things he could say— _a person who loved us, who talked about you, who was trying, who I was always there to pick up when she fell_ —but he knows they will upset Juno. And he doesn’t need to say them.

“That’s why you stayed?” Juno whispers.

Benten shakes his head. It’s only half the truth, but his mouth is dry.

“Then what?”

“I don’t know.” It sounds like a child’s voice; it sounds so old it scares him.

“She tried to kill you.” And this, too, plaintive.

Benten drags a hand down his face. “I know.”

* * *

The beau says her name is Diamond and puts Benten in mind of unbreakable things: Hyperion City skyrises, the sun through the dome, his own heart. Benten cooks while Juno and Diamond laugh in the living room. While Benten chops onions, he listens. While he sets the stove timer, he listens. He remembers Juno’s red eyes and the quiet of their heartbeats, remembers Juno’s anxious pacing from the front door to the end of the hall, but the Juno laughing with Diamond seems carefree, his voice lighter than Benten has ever heard it. His laugh is so rich and warm Benten can feel it in the air. Benten keeps one eye on the stove and the other on the living room doorway, where he can see nothing but Juno and Diamond’s socked feet, the sofa still pushed up against the wall.

And when they go quiet, when the soft murmurs that Benten knows accompany kissing reach him, he pours more oil on the pan and gives them privacy. He stays out of their conversation.

While he serves the meal, Benten asks Diamond everything: her blood type (A), her star sign (Cancer), her favorite thing about Juno (the look in his eye he gets when he’s concentrating, like he could decode the entire world, strip it to its essentials, understand the bones of it). What she does at the HCPD and how she likes it. How she met Juno. Benten asks these things with a straight face and a grin in his voice.

Over dinner, Juno and Diamond fumble through a recollection of their meet-cute. Benten can hear the admiration in Juno’s voice, more dangerous than romantic love, a sort of unattainable yearning that sits just underneath Juno’s words, so he watches carefully. They cannot yet finish each other’s sentences, which is a small mercy.

Benten doesn’t voice any of these thoughts. He lets them talk.

And then, unexpectedly, Juno says, “Y’know, she put me up for the promotion.”

“No way,” Benten says. Diamond meets his gaze with eyes as delicate as glass and as bright as a gemstone. They unnerve Benten; they see through him.

“It’s not a big deal,” says Diamond, looking down. Her tone is almost dismissive. “Anyway, it’s not because I had a crush. He’s a good cop. A good person.”

Throughout the meal, Benten is aware of his presence in the conversation, his intrusion on the cloying oneness of lovers. He watches his words when he speaks. He laughs and lets their laughter drown his out. He thinks about getting out of the house, about leaving them before he has to spend the evening sitting across the living room from them while they hold each other on the sofa. So when the last fork has scraped the last bare plate, Benten says, “You two want the apartment?”

A sharp blush rises on Juno’s face. “Only if you’ve got somewhere to go.”

“The world’s my oyster. Plus, half of Hyperion never sleeps and the other half doesn’t sleep because of it, so there’s plenty of places to go. I’ll be fine.”

So, after clearing the counters and scrubbing down the dishes, Benten tucks his comms into his pocket, grabs his house keys and his most fashionable coat, and walks along sidewalks until he loses himself in Hyperion’s neon. The dome never lets the nights get cold enough to see his breath, and Benten finds himself longing for the dramatics of leaving a breath that anyone could see.

He hops up on a concrete median and walks out across an overpass, testing his balance with every step. Cars rush past him, their lights blaring, their horns loud as fire drills as they kick dust into his face. Every passing breeze makes him aware that he is on a timer. And when the dizziness sets in, he jumps down and keeps walking. The roar of vehicles makes his head go blank; it matches the tinnitus.

He sits there for a long time, swinging his legs against the median, avoiding speeding vehicles, watching the stars. At one point he lays back on the median, folds his hands over his stomach, and stares at the glistening dome far overhead. It is peaceful, his thoughts cleared out by the traffic, nowhere to go, no one waiting for him.

The city is big and, in the night, like this, it doesn’t know him. That is the greatest mercy he could ask for: streetlight anonymity, his body just another body in a heavy coat walking through its streets with his head down. He is not the boy on the news streams, the boy with a mother who pulled a gun on one of her own. He is not a name, not a sound in the air, nothing but the empty space between words. He hasn’t felt free like this in a long time.

He stops in a convenience store and buys a couple of sodas, shoving them into his pockets on the way out. He uses his own creds. His heart stops before he lays them on the counter, and then he smooths them flat. He chugs both sodas to stay awake and tosses the bottles into gutters. 

In the end, he lets himself into the dark studio. Because he left the key at home, he has to climb in through the bathroom window, forgotten in the back of the building and therefore not locked. Inside, after dropping his coat beside the bathroom door, he does pushups on the mats until his body grows heavy with sleep. He stretches until his body is so loose it aches. He runs a few steps, slower than he ever does with someone watching him.

He sits in the center of the room, the uncanny yellow glow of streetlamps and headlights coming in and refracting through the room, and he studies himself in that great mirror. He doesn’t look like himself, the hollows around his eyes and in his cheeks almost as deep as his mother’s. He sits there in his slacks and a t-shirt, unbodying himself the longer he looks. He is ephemeral, liminal; he is a speck in the space of the galaxy, a speck in the history of humanity, and it makes him feel humble. 

Benten knows Juno’s schedule, knows he has work in the morning, and when he comes home, Juno is rubbing a towel through his hair. He glances up while Benten removes his shoes. Benten takes a moment to scan for evidence of Diamond—shoes beside the door, a coat over a kitchen chair, bruises on Juno’s neck—and he only sees the bruises. 

“Busy night?” Benten say, smirking. Juno shifts so the towel covers his face. 

Instead, Juno grumbles, “Sorry to hear you didn’t die out on the streets.” It’s an affectionate grumble. Benten thinks it’s affectionate. So he drops his keys and coat on the counter and opens the fridge. While he paws through covered bowls and jars, Juno says, “What do you think of her?”

“I think she’s gonna break your heart. And,” Benten says before Juno can interrupt, “I think you like her a lot. I was counting your smiles.”

“I can’t believe you,” says Juno, a bit self-conscious, a bit exasperated.

“And you smiled more last night than you did all through middle school. Come on. Why were you so nervous about… her? Talking about her. Me meeting her.”

“I wasn’t.”

Benten raises his eyebrows. 

“I mean,” Juno amends, “I wasn’t _not_ worried, but that’s because… it’s not easy for me, being…”

He doesn’t say anything for so long that Benten supplements, “Being in love.”

Juno sighs. He drapes the towel over one shoulder and looks at Benten. His face looks so young. “Yeah. And I… I guess I worried that if you saw that, how… how deep I was, it’d be just another reason for me to run away from it. Another excuse. Another reason I couldn’t have it, because if I want something, the world tries its hardest to keep it away from me. I wanted to be _happy,_ Benten. All I wanted was to be happy. And I am. I have her. I have you, alive. And I’m worried…”

Benten peels apart sliced deli meat and focuses on that. If he were to look at Juno, he is sure he would drown. The apartment is so small and Juno needs him and he doesn’t know how to face those intense eyes head-on. He says, instead, “That you’re going to lose that, too.”

“Yeah.” It falls like a heartbeat. “That about sums it up. You know why I didn’t date in high school like you did?”

Benten isn’t sure he wants to have this conversation, but he’s already walked into it, Juno’s voice rough from the shower and from something else, his presence something Benten can’t ignore. He walks into the room, and Benten hops up onto the kitchen counter to avoid him. “You weren’t interested?”

Juno laughs. “I wish.” His voice is so halting, so unsure. He doesn’t want to be having this conversation either. “No, it’s—actually, it’s because it terrified me.”

A headache blooms like a flower underneath Benten’s broken skull, like a car brake. He closes his eyes, but the headache is already there. 

“Because every time I fell, I fell with my whole heart. I thought to myself, Juno Steel, you could ruin someone with a love like that. I thought if I let myself fall into it, I’d never know where I end and love begins.”

Benten’s voice is a whisper. “Do you now?”

Juno looks at him for a long time, his head cocked, his cheeks pulled in. He looks at Benten and sees through him. Whatever Juno means by _love_ goes deeper than anything Benten has ever felt. It swallows Juno; it consumes his whole self.

Juno looks, and then he says, “No.”

* * *

While Benten unpacks boxes in the new two-bedroom, Juno flicks through television channels with a look of intense concentration. The static in every skip, the sudden, disembodied roar of voices, stokes Benten’s headache. Juno left all the boxes in the front hall, in the kitchen, so Benten scans each label and relocates it to the appropriate room: the two bedrooms each more cramped than the one in Juno’s old place; the bathroom with a real tub, stained but theirs; the kitchen door propped open. 

The best part, though, is that place belongs to _Juno and Benzaiten Steel._

Benten doesn’t know what Juno is looking for on all those channels, so he tells Juno to keep it down and closes his bedroom door.

In the quiet, he tears through the tape with a kitchen knife. He sits on the unmade bed and sorts through clothes, trinkets, memories. He lays them out on the bed, proof of who he was, of the space he takes up in the world. His mother had a box in her closet filled with old drawings from when Benten and Juno were kids, art projects she didn’t think to throw away until they were teenagers, as though she could hold onto the kids they used to be back when their lives were uncomplicated. Benten doesn’t have any of those now, any markers of his life with Mom, but as he lays out his belongings, none of them feel like his. All his things spread out around him and he is the only thing he knows for sure belongs to himself.

The furniture came first, Juno’s bed and the sofa for Benten to sleep on until they could hit the shops. Juno drove the moving van uptown and Benten followed at a crawl in Juno’s car. Slowly, the gaping apartment filled up with signs of life.

The television rumbles through the walls. Benten opens the door and calls down the hall, “Do you want me to get your boxes, too?”

Juno says nothing, but Benten can hear the level voice of a broadcaster saying, _Everyone in Hyperion City is waiting with bated breath to hear the outcome of this trial—_

“Juno?” Benten says. He is cold but he doesn’t want to admit it. His skin doesn’t feel like his, and his instinct is to take his keys and go. “Did you hear me?”

“No, I’ll get them. Gimme an hour, though.” It’s as light as a handwave, but Benten knows Juno, knows that a voice like that means his head is somewhere far away, somewhere he can’t be broken out of.

With the door open, the clamor from the television throbs in Benten’s temples. He says, as calmly as he can, “Can you turn that off? Put it on your comms or something?”

Juno’s voice is distracted. “Sure, yeah. Just a sec.”

But the broadcaster’s drone doesn’t cease, so even though he knows what’s coming—the plea, a jury of people who never met him deciding on an appropriate punishment—even though he doesn’t know if his surviving will reduce the sentence, Benten tiptoes down the hall. In the living room, surrounded by unopened boxes, Juno sits with one knee up on the armchair. He has his tongue between his teeth and a dark, unreadable expression on his face. He looks murderous. On the screen, the courtroom, its dark mahogany and its raised bench and its rows of seats, none of the faces recognizable. The video quality is so smooth that even in the living room doorway, Benten feels like he is in of that room. It feels like vertigo. 

He squints against the glow, and instinctively he raises a hand to his temple. He rubs the scar, taking comfort in it.

“I’m alive,” he whispers. Someone is talking on the courtroom floor but none of their words sound like words. He doesn’t see Mom, but only because he looks away.

“What was that?” Juno twists in the chair to look at him.

Like a teenager caught mid-kiss, Benten pulls his hand back. “Nothing.” But Juno’s sharp eyes track the movement. Juno rises and passes Benten on his way to the kitchen, where he retrieves his comms from the counter. He detaches the earpieces and puts them in his ears. Meanwhile that unintelligible roar, the whole apartment bowing under the weight of Sarah Steel’s presence.

Juno stands so close; he fiddles with his comms, not looking at Benten. 

Benten says, “Juno.”

“Yeah?”

“Do you have to watch that?”

Juno turns the broadcast down further, and in the near silence, Benten takes a deep breath. Juno sets the remote on the counter. Behind him, Benten can see the screen, the camerawork cinematic. More entertainment than law, Sarah Steel a sensation in Hyperion City. Benten’s chest is so tight he can barely breathe, so he looks at Juno instead and then his own hands, shaking in front of him. He folds them into fists and unfolds them.

Juno exhales slowly and says, “I need to know how it happens. I need to know what she says, exactly what she says. I don’t want to learn it second-hand from a recap tomorrow or from some headline in the paper. I don’t want to, but I have to make sure no one, no one, can ever lie to me about her again.” His voice is rough, run through with anger. There is something safe about that anger, something Benten knows he can trust. How many screaming matches has Juno shouldered to keep Mom’s wrath from Benten? How many broken plates made him the first line of defense? How many preteen nights ended with Mom’s broken voice on the other side of the door while Juno held Benten—touch always unfamiliar to them—and stared down the lock with eyes brighter and more intense than anything Benten had ever seen?

And Juno tuned in to the trial.

Mom says, _Benzaiten, if you’re watching this—_

And Benten looks. Her gaunt face, her dark, pleading eyes, her lips pressed together. No fear, or maybe so much fear it’s impossible to see. The sharp box of the monitor a guillotine.

And Benten is afraid, too.

Mom says, _Thank you for not coming._

It’s too loud and the ringing can’t keep it out, her quivering voice, a voice that has haunted his dreams since he was little, a voice he locked his bedroom door and hid from, a voice that, sometimes, dripped with so much love that Benten felt cruel for holding anything back from her. For holding any of himself back.

In a broken voice, Mom says, _Benzaiten._ It breaks Benten’s heart.

“Turn it off,” says Benten. When Juno reaches for the remote in slow motion, Benten snaps, “Turn it off!”

As he snatches the remote out of Juno’s hand, Mom says, in that garbled, television-static voice, _I love him._ His body is cold and his head is screaming something awful and all he can think is if she stays in his head a moment longer he’s going to cry.

_My baby boy._

_I love him._

So when Benten hurls the remote into the monitor, smashing it completely, he’s breathing so hard he isn’t sure he’s breathing at all. He’s too hot and too cold, and he bites his lip so hard he feels something tear.

Pieces of glass fall off the monitor. Benten doesn’t hear them hit the floor. His blood is too loud and his headache is too loud and Juno’s concerned look, his hands on Benten’s, are loud, too. The noise trickles through him, and when he looks at his hands, he finds them shaking. His muscles are still tensed. He wants to throw something again, to keep throwing things until he remembers how to breathe. All that damage. He did that. For years every week began with the sound of something breaking.

And sometimes, when he was older, it was Benten who cleaned up Mom’s hands. Who made sure they always had a box of plasters and a non-stinging disinfectant. Who told her, _It’s okay_?

Once broken, a thing stays broken. Basic inertia. Which means there isn’t a lot of hope for her kids. Benten looks at that broken monitor, at the place where the remote cleft straight through and lodged in the wall behind it, and he sees his reflection. He is shaking so hard he has to press his hands against his chest, but then his heart shudders instead. He wants to step out of his body, but he can’t hear anything but his own breathing. He can’t feel anything but the enormity of his own body. He is so heavy; he is his own ball and chain. The distance between him and his brother is a desert. His brother with the trial in their home. The way Mom’s voice distorted as she screamed: _Where are they? You rotten monster, you did this to me. Everything you do, you do to sabotage me. You think I don’t know?_

And Benten’s voice shuddering out of control, halfway to crying with the overwhelming crush of her emotions. With the fear in her voice, the fear in her hands, the fear in the muzzle so close Benten went cross-eyed to see it. Benten saying, _Mom, I didn’t—I’m sure they’re there somewhere. Mom, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please._ Trying to keep his cool, not knowing what was in her purse, not knowing anything. Trying, as he always did, to talk her down.

“I’m sorry,” Juno says into the quiet. The screen is dark and Benten can see the inside of the monitor. Without its glow, the apartment is much darker. “Ben, I’m—” He is breathing hard, too, staring at Benten’s hands.

Benten’s voice is wild and ragged. “I shouldn’t have—” 

“You had every right,” Juno says, quickly, as though if he says it quick enough, that will make it true. As though anything could make Benten deserving of this moment’s kindness, this backtrack, this U-turn around their inherited anger.

“No, it’s not your fault. It was your monitor, and I…” The anger drains out of Benten’s voice.

Juno takes Benten’s wrists, his fingers gentle but insistent, but Benten’s muscles are locked. They keep Juno’s hands against his heart. Juno says, “It was our monitor, Benten. And we can get another. That doesn’t matter. What matters is I’m—” His voice breaks, and Benten thinks they both might cry. Then Juno chokes out, “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have put it on.”

Benten closes his eyes and lets it wash through him. Not the apology so much as the gentleness in Juno’s voice, the genuine concern. But he doesn’t trust himself as a judge of character, even of the characters he’s known all his life, so he tries to focus on the words. He grabs on and tugs.

 _I’ll change,_ says the woman sitting before the judge and jury with no one to vouch for her and the case against her built on medical records and coworkers’ testimonies. _I’ll be better,_ says the woman in Benten’s blood, and his blood burns with it. He twitches and his hands fall around Juno’s like he’s holding a lifeline. He takes his gaze from the broken monitor and looks at them. They just look like hands, knuckles and ligaments, and Benten has never seen Juno fire a gun. He doesn’t know what Juno looks like with his elbows stiff and a target in his sight, doesn’t know what expression his face takes or whether he looks like a different person. He hopes Juno looks like a different person. He hopes that Juno’s hands are just hands. He hopes that Juno doesn’t bring the violence home with him. 

Juno laughs, a thin sound. It’s a defense Benten doesn’t see often from Juno, a laugh bitter and stripped of sarcasm. Almost revelatory. “I could have gone to a bar and watched it like a sport. I could have put it on my comms. I could have… anything other than this. Ben, I’m—” 

“I know,” says Benten, and he laughs himself. He reaches up and wipes away tears. “You don’t need to say it.”

“I do,” Juno insists. “You need to hear it.”

“Okay,” says Benten, so Juno looks him in the eyes and says, as calm and slow as he can with his shaking teeth, “I’m sorry, Benten.”

Benten looks away and nods. He looks down the hall, where boxes obscure both bedroom doors, and he tells himself this is his. For the first time in his life, he belongs somewhere that is his by choice.

And he can’t say it’s okay. After years of forced apologies, years of expected forgiveness, he can’t say it. He just nods and hopes his brother understands.

“We’re gonna keep doing this, huh?” says Juno thickly, and that’s when Benten realizes Juno is crying, too. “Fucking up. Making the same mistakes. Making her mistakes. Being her, and then trying…” Juno laughs, then, short and bitter. He closes his eyes, the lashes wet and dark. “To be better.”

“Will we?” Benten asks. He is a kid again and his first and last line of defense against the world is his brother. Juno is the only person in the world who understands. If Juno says yes, Benten will trust him. 

“Yeah,” says Juno. It doesn’t sound like he believes it, but he says, again, “Yeah. We will.”

“How do you know that?” Juno’s hands hot in his, both of them shaking. Both of their shoulders catching with sobs. Both of them holding it back. And it’s not that Benten doesn’t trust him; it’s that the past digs itself into trenches. He asks, and he sees the truth in Juno’s eyes before he speaks.

“I don’t. But I have you, and she’s not here, and we have the rest of our lives. Do you trust me, Benzaiten?”

Benten looks at his brother, his eyes shiny with tears and his face intent in the near-dark, and he thinks about what trusting Juno means. 

It means a hand that never lets go of his. It means a home under both their names. It means that everything the courtroom holds over them matters less than this moment, than the promise that no matter what happens, no matter what sort of people become, they will always try.

So Benten sniffs and squeezes Juno’s hands in his, and he whispers, “Yes.”

**Author's Note:**

> My word document for this bad boy is "sing it to sleep" which really tells you what I was focusing on. Admittedly I didn't do as much research as I could have. Nevertheless, let me know what you thought of my Benten.


End file.
